HIGH PROFILE.

No Pie In The Sky

WASHINGTON — Hazel Rollins O'Leary is one Cabinet member who knows how to take a pie in the face.

When the U.S. Energy Department fell a few thousand dollars short of a goal O'Leary had set to raise money for federal government charities, she hatched the idea of a pie-throwing contest.

She enlisted the help of senior staff members, and agency employees then paid for the privilege of tossing a few gooey pies at her and other politically appointed bosses.

She not only reached her fundraising goal, but now the tough-minded O'Leary also has been asked to head the entire Clinton administration's charity campaign in 1995.

It isn't difficult to imagine that O'Leary, 56, could convince President Clinton to take a lemon meringue pie in the face for a good cause.

This tactic does not mean that the first black and the first woman to head the troubled energy agency instinctively reverts to the bake-sale method of fundraising.

Instead, it exemplifies her drive to set high goals, her determination to meet them, her sometimes playful side and her desire to lighten and open up a downtrodden agency that until now has been veiled in secrecy and tight security.

Charged with overseeing a staff of 20,000 federal workers and 149,000 contractors, O'Leary has grappled with shifting the agency from its military Cold War focus on nuclear-weapons production to dismantling them and pushing for cleaner energy sources.

Becoming energy secretary was not part of the former utility company executive's life plan.

Her goal was to be chief executive officer of Northern States Power, the Minnesota company she had worked for since 1989 and of which she had been a president nine days before her Senate confirmation hearing.

Clinton heard of O'Leary while attending a weekend retreat at Hilton Head, S.C. A mutual friend suggested she was the perfect candidate.

She has had her share of detractors, however.

Environmental and military-issues organizations, leery of her utility background, swung into action in a bid to prevent her confirmation.

"I spent more time and energy than anyone else trying to keep her out of the government," said David Culp, legislative coordinator for the Plutonium Challenge, a coalition of national environmental groups. "But I've dramatically changed my views. She's a shining star in the Cabinet."

Once O'Leary interviewed with the president and first lady, she knew it was time for a detour from her booming utility career.

"I wouldn't have (taken the job) if I didn't think it was the right thing to do," O'Leary said in her 7th floor office overlooking the nation's capital. "It's back-breaking. It's bone-crunching-but I love it."

It has been an easy transition from executive to federal bureaucrat because she's running the layered agency like a business and, so far, although not everyone is readily open to change, it's working.

"It will never run like the most efficient corporation, but pushing it in that direction is beneficial," said Dan Reicher, who as an anti-nuclear activist sued the Energy Department countless times but became an insider when O'Leary hired him as deputy chief of staff.

Just by walking every day in the door of the Forrestal Building a few blocks from the Capitol, O'Leary is challenging the system. She is not the stringent military leader of yore: The previous secretary was an admiral.

When she entered her first Energy Department senior staff meeting, O'Leary was shocked to encounter a conference room packed with white, clean-shaven men, all with expensive-looking cufflinks on their shirtsleeves.

"There is nothing diverse about this group," she thought, then swiftly moved to surround herself with a more culturally and philosophically mixed set of advisers. She says her first move was to hire a man with a beard.

Last December one of the newly appointed staffers, Reicher, alerted O'Leary to the horrifying tales of involuntary human radiation experiments conducted by the government.

"You're not going to believe this," Reicher said.

The decisions that day made the previously low-profile O'Leary a Cabinet star, spotlighted by media scrutiny and the watchful eye of the American public.

When Reicher told her of the experiments, O'Leary was dressed in workout attire for her twice-weekly aerobics class in the department's gym. As she boosted her heart rate exercising, her mind confirmed what had to be done: Start to open up 32 million pages of department documents.

The Office of Classification suddenly was renamed the Office of Declassification.

"I feel as though every day, or at least twice a week for as long as I'm going to be here, the door will open and someone will say, `Secretary, you're not going to believe this.' "